Mount Clemens used to make its own milk. Our newest arrival is a 1940s Miller Brothers advertising sign, red as a stop light, from the dairy that four brothers built here in 1923 and ran for nearly fifty years. It hung in a grocery window for one reason: to tell you whose bottles were in the cooler.
Miller Brothers started in March 1923, when John C. Miller Sr. and his sons bought out the Schrade Dairy. The father had spent eighteen years running the Chesterfield Creamery north of town, so he knew the work. John Jr. took the plant, brother Roy took the milk route, and there was only the one. Brother Arthur and cousin Fred Schonschack came in soon after, and in 1927 a fourth brother, Harry, took the books.
By the decade this sign was made, that single route had grown into a bottling dairy with creamery stores of its own around town. We Deal In was the standard opening of a dealer sign, the kind a dairy supplied free to any grocery or lunch counter carrying its bottles. The dairy got its name into a hundred windows for the price of the metal.
The lettering is embossed, pressed up out of the sheet from behind, so WE DEAL IN, MILK, and ICE CREAM stand proud of the red and catch light from across a room. A blue ribbon banner carries the name across the middle, with a capped milk bottle standing where MILLER meets BROS. A short chain still runs across the back, so it was made to hang, and it keeps most of its gloss under the fine scratches a working sign earns honestly.
Miller Brothers stopped bottling milk in 1968, and by 1971 the family name had passed to another company. The bottles are long gone. The sign is not. Come see it at Pollyanna’s Antiques in downtown Mt. Clemens. We are open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 10 to 4, and there is a particular pleasure in hanging a piece of your own town on the wall.